Bezos briefly becomes world’s richest person, surpassing Bill Gates

When markets opened on July 27, 2017, Bezos briefly became the world’s richest person, surpassing Bill Gates with a net worth of just over $90 billion.

He lost the title later in the day when Amazon’s stock dropped, returning him to second place with a net worth just below $90 billion.

According to Forbes, Amazon stock opened up 1.6% on Thursday, adding $1.4 billion to Bezos’ net worth. That was enough to put him ahead of Gates, who was last surpassed on Forbes’ real-time rankings for just two days nearly a year ago by Spanish retail giant Amancio Ortega.

As per Forbes, Bezos is now the seventh person to hold the title of the world’s richest person and the third American to top the global ranks besides Gates and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.

While Buffett appeared on Forbes’ first ranking of America’s 400 Richest people in 1982 and Gates joined four years later, Bezos is a newer addition to Forbes’ wealth rankings.
Forbes started tracking billionaires around the globe in 1987. He first appeared on the Forbes 400 in 1998, a year after Amazon went public, with a $1.6 billion fortune. Bezos ranked third richest in the world on Forbes 2017 list of the World’s Billionaires, published in March, with a fortune of $72.8 billion.

Bezos would be nowhere close to being the world’s wealthiest person had Gates not given so much of his fortune to philanthropy. Gates, who created the Giving Pledge with Buffett to encourage billionaires to give at least half of their wealth to charitable causes, had given away $31.1 billion over the course of his lifetime through end of 2016.

Forbes estimates that Bezos, who has not signed the pledge, had given approximately $100 million to charity through the end of 2015. In June, Bezos tweeted out a request for ideas for his philanthropy, garnering thousands of responses.

Apart from Amazon, Bezos’ other diversified business interests include aerospace and newspapers. He is the founder and manufacturer of Blue Origin (founded in 2000) with test flights to space which started in 2015, and plans for commercial suborbital human spaceflight beginning in 2018. In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post newspaper. A number of other business investments are managed through Bezos Expeditions.